From the point of view of the gathering of data, the fellow has done participant observation and recorded interviews with 23 Algerian veterans, including 2 women. 5 sons of veterans and 6 nephews (including 1 women) have also been interviewed: they have been included and involved in the research, because they played often a key role, far beyond their role of “fixers” or translators (interpreting, commenting, disagreeing and intervening generally). The fellow has also done participant observation and recorded interviews with 19 French veterans, and 1 son of veteran. In Algeria, the interviews have been recorded across the entire region of the Aurès-Nememcha; in France, mainly in Paris and Marseille. The fieldwork was organised in three phases: between January and March 2016, and again in July 2017 for the interviews in Algeria; between December 2016 and February 2017 for the interviews in France. Archival research was conducted mainly in Paris and Aix-en-Provence.
During these two years, Brazzoduro has also been very active in the host institution: teaching (“The Global 20th Century”), participating in seminars (including the seminar series convened by the Oxford Centre for Global History, where the fellow is an associate researcher) and organising events. The most significant of these was a 3-day international conference The Algerian War of Independence: Global and Local Histories (1954-62, and Beyond). Co-convened with Dr James McDougall and Dr Natalya Vince (Portsmouth), the conference was funded by the British Academy and the Faculty of History, and was held in May 2017 (Middle East Centre and Trinity College, Oxford).
In the second year, the fellow focused mainly on the preparation of several publications based on the results of the research. Two of these publications are articles for peer-reviewed journals. The first, ‘A Third Millennium Memorial? French Veterans and the Impossible Commemoration of the Franco-Algerian War” will appear in History & Memory in 2018. The second, ‘Experience and Memories of French and Algerian Veterans. Remembering the “petite guerre” of the Aurès-Nememcha Mountains’ has been submitted to the Journal of Contemporary History. The theoretical framework of the research project (‘Oral Histories and Postcolonial Memories. Towards a Multivocal Narrative of the Algerian War for Independence’) was published in 2016 as a book chapter.
During the second year, Brazzoduro had also worked towards the publication of two different books. The first is a Special Issue of the Journal of North African Studies entitled ‘The Algerian War of Independence: Global and Local Histories (1954-62, and Beyond)’. This collects papers from the May 2017 Oxford conference, and will be published by the end of 2018. The second book is the monograph resulting from the project, titled ‘The “Revolution” in the Aurès. War, Memory, Belonging, Generations (1954-2016). (Expression of interest received from Cambridge University Press.)
In terms of presentation of results to various audiences, Brazzoduro has presented the findings of the project at several academic meetings: ‘Constantine et sa region dans le movement national et la guerre de libération’ (conference, Université Mentouri, Constantine, Algeria); XIII Annual Conference of the Italian Society for Middle Eastern Studies (University of Catania); ‘Representing Extreme Violence’ (seminar, Paris Ouest Nanterre University); ‘De-Framing the Mediterranean from the 21st Century: Places, Routes, Actors’ (Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Rethymno, Grece, 19-29 September 2016).
